Thursday, October 16, 2014

GlideRoom: Hangouts Without The Hangups

Many years ago, a friend of mine took a picture of me with a dildo stuck to my face.

The worst thing about this picture is that I didn't have it on my hard drive. I found it via Google Images. But the best part is it took me at least 3 minutes to find it, so, by modern standards, it's pretty obscure. Or at least it was, until I put it here on my blog again.

(Actually, the worst thing about this image is that I just found out it's now apparently being used to advertise porn sites, without my knowledge, consent, or participation.)

Anyway, back in the day, this picture went on Myspace, because of course it did. And eventually the friend who took this picture became a kindergarten teacher, while I became a ridiculously overrated blogger. That's not just an opinion, it's a matter of fact, because Google over-emphasizes the importance of programmer content, relative to literally any other kind of content, when it computes its search rankings. And so, through the "magic" of Google, the first search result for my former photographer's name - and she was by this point a kindergarten teacher - was this picture on my Myspace page.

She emailed me like, "Hi! It's been a while. Can you take that picture down?"

And of course, the answer was no, because I hadn't used Myspace in years, and I didn't have any idea what my password was, and I didn't have the same email address any more, and I didn't even have the computer I had back when Myspace existed. Except it turned out that Myspace was still existing for some reason, and was maybe causing some headaches for my friend as well. I have to tell you, if you're worried that you might have accidentally fucked up your friend's career in a serious way, all because you thought it would be funny to strap a dildo to your face, it doesn't feel awesome.

(And by the way, I'm pretty sure she's a great teacher. You shouldn't have to worry that some silly thing you did as a young adult, or in your late teens, would still haunt you five to fifteen years later, but that's the Internet we built by accident.)

So I went hunting on Myspace for how to take a picture down for an account you forgot you had, and Myspace was like, "Dude, no problem! Just tell us where you lived when you had that account, and what your email address was, and what made-up bullshit answers you gave us for our security questions, since nobody in their right minds would ever provide accurate answers to those questions if they understood anything at all about the Internet!"

So that didn't go so well, either. I didn't know the answers to any of those questions. I didn't have the email address any more, and I had no idea what my old physical address was. I would have a hard time figuring out what my current address is. Probably, if I needed to know that, I might be able to find it in Gmail. That's certainly where I would turn first, because Google has eaten my ability to remember things and left me a semi-brainless husk, as most of you know, because it's done the same thing to you, and your friends, and your family.

Speak of the devil - around this time, Google started pressuring everybody in the fucking universe to sign up for Google Plus, Larry Page's desperatebid to turn Google into Facebook, because who on earth would ever be content to be one of the richest people in the history of creation, if Valleywag stopped paying attention to you for five whole minutes?

Since then, my photographer/teacher friend fortunately figured out a different way to get the image off Myspace, and I made it a rule to avoid Google Plus. Having had such a negative experience with Myspace, I took the position that any social network you join creates presence debt, like the technical debt incurred by legacy code - the nasty, counterproductive residue of a previous identity. So I was like, fuck Google Plus. I lasted for years without joining that horrible thing, but I finally capitulated this summer. I joined a company called Panda Strike, and a lot of us work remote (myself included), so we periodically gather via Google Hangouts to chat and convene as a group.

But just because I had consented to use Hangouts, that didn't mean I was going down without a fight.

When I "joined" Google Plus, I first opened up an Incognito window in Chrome. Then I made up a fake person with fake biographical attributes and joined as that person. Thereafter, whenever I saw a Google Hangouts link in IRC or email, I would first open up an Incognito window, then log into Google Plus "in disguise," and then copy/paste the Hangouts URL into the Incognito window's location textfield, and then - and only then - enter the actual Hangout.

This is, of course, too much fucking work. But at least it's work I've created for myself. Plenty of people who are willing to go along with Google's bullying approach to selling Google Plus still get nothing but trouble when they try to use Hangouts.

If anyone knows how to operate google hangout I'd appreciate any help. People don't get my invitations, but they can call me into a 2nd one?

Imagine how amazing it would be if all you needed to join a live, ongoing video chat was a URL. No username, no password, no second-rate social network you've been strong-armed into joining (or pretending to join). Just a link. You click it, you're in the chat room, you're done.

Panda Strike has built this site. It's called GlideRoom, and it's Google Hangouts without the hangups, or the hassle, or indeed the shiny, happy dystopia.

Clicking "Get A Room" takes you to a chat room, whose URL is a unique hash. All you do to invite people to your chat room is send them the URL. You don't need to authorize them, authenticate them, invite them to a social network which has no other appealing features (and plenty of unappealing ones), or jump through any other ridiculous hoops.